go viral

The sociologic phenomenon was named thus because it is analogous to the way in which viruses propagate, with exponential potential. This phrasal verb developed in the late 20th or early 21st century as a name for a phenomenon that has existed since humans became capable of exposing one another to ideas in highly contagious ways; thus, gossip and rumor in close-quartered populations, print circulation, and broadcasting were all enough to produce it, but the advent of the internet, and more specifically the web era and smartphone era, provided many new instances and the occasion to bestow a name on the theme. See also meme, a word coined in 1976 for a phenomenon as old as human interaction.

go viral (third-person singular simple present goes viral, present participle going viral, simple past went viral, past participle gone viral)

1. (sociology) To be rapidly and frequently shared, especially through social media, but (with retroactive application to pre-internet occurrences) also via gossip or as a collective response to broadcasting or widespread print circulation.
   • 2013 November 4, Miller, Greg, “Here's How Memes Went Viral — In the 1800s ​”, in Wired‎:

     Hundreds of long-forgotten texts that went viral in the 19th century are being discovered by a new collaboration of humanities scholars and computer scientists.

   • 2020 January 29, Dan Brooks, “Comedy Written for the Machines”, in New York Times Magazine‎:

     After watching hours of these videos, I realized there’s no use trying to make sense of any one of them, but taken as a body of work, they tell a story: the struggles of a person trying to go viral again.

   • 2020 May 8, Louise Matsakis, “The Year the Internet Thought I Was MacKenzie Bezos”, in Wired‎:

     A group of girls from Norway asked me why their videos weren’t going viral like the ones from their American peers.

   • 2021 May 4, Taylor Lorenz, quoting Mr. Beast, “Mr. Beast, YouTube Star, Wants to Take Over the Business World”, in The New York Times‎, ISSN 0362-4331:

     “Once you know how to make a video go viral, it’s just about how to get as many out as possible,” he told Bloomberg in December. “You can practically make unlimited money.”

• → Dutch: viral gaan (calque)
• → German: viral gehen (calque)

• break the Internet